Unprocessed in Seattle

October Unprocessed has officially begun, and so far I’d say we’ve been fairly successful even with an unplanned trip to Seattle this weekend. Unplanned trips are not good for unprocessed eating, I can tell you that. But we made smart choices whenever we could.

I won’t bore you with all of my food choices this weekend, but they included a fabulous meal at Revel in Seattle, some pasta with a housemade sauce and beer at Elysian Fields, and of course, delicious coffee. I am sure that we ate some preservatives in there somewhere, but this challenge did cause us to make smarter choices even when eating out, so I’ll take it as a win.

Today, we did much better. I started with a Lara Bar for breakfast, and for lunch and dinner we had this Lemony Chickpea Stirfry. We made this on Friday (in September), and way back then, tofu was fine to eat. Turns out, it’s not fine when you’re eating unprocessed, so I picked out the tofu tonight. Is this cheating a little? I say no. Also, this meal would be totally delicious without the tofu anyway, so I’m not sure why it’s even in there.

Much like my friend Taylor, I’ve been surprised at the things that contain processed ingredients. The most surprising so far: water. We bought two different types of bottled water on this trip. Both contained ingredients other than water. On the way up, we purchased Smart Water, and that one is probably our fault because apparently, that is Smart Water’s “thing.” It has electrolytes and whatnot to make you run faster or something. So on the way home, I grabbed a bottle of Dasani, which is a Coke product, and it also has added crap. Teaches me to trust Coke, eh?

We’ve got some recipes planned for the week, but I’ll wait to share those as they come. I’m enjoying this experiment though, because it’s making us evaluate the foods we buy and try to find alternatives when necessary. It turns out there are lots of unprocessed, ready to eat foods, you just have to be looking for them. Doing this for a month gives me hope that we’ll switch to these new natural brands for the long term, which make us less processed overall. For that alone, I feel like this month is worthwhile.